Our thanks to Rob Francis, for agreeing to share these striking images with us. They were taken on the Sunday before Christmas, just below Alsop car park on the Tissington trail.
As Rob says: “The conditions were strange to say the least. One of them has the image on the photographer ( ie me) projected unto the fog – eerie!”
Update: In the comments, Peter T explains that this phenomenon – both the shadow and the rainbow circle that surrounds it – is known as “the brockenspectre and the glory“.
Please click on each photo to enlarge it.
More photos:
PARWICH.ORG 
I have always wanted to see a ‘brockenspectre and the glory’, but have not till I saw the middle picture above. A ‘brockenspectre’ is your shadow on clouds below, which I have seen in Snowdonia, but ‘the glory’ is a rainbow halo effect surrounding your shadow, which has eluded me. Thank you Rob for posting these photos. Interestingly in Rob’s photo the spectre seems to be a shadow of what looks like a tree stump rather than a person, or was Rob holding his left arm up to make his shadow minic the tree stump?
This has also prompted me to Google the word ‘brokenspectre’ which sounds German, but which I have never previously been able to find in a German or English dictionary. Also any Germans I have asked deny any knowledge of the word. Well here is a link that answers my question about the origin of the word http://www.weathernotebook.org/transcripts/2003/10/29.php . It takes its name from a peak in Germany’s Harz Mountains called Brocken, where mountaineers saw the phenomenon in the early 1800s, and thought it was ghosts or spirits.
Fantastic photo’s, but what is the miniature orange brontosaurus doing walking across the foreground of photograph number 3?
I wonder whether this is one of the reasons that the Harz Mountains in general and the Brocken in particular, acquired a reputation for witchcraft and similar?
(Geek note – Also of great interest to some because of the steam narrow gauge railway that operates to the summit of Brocken!).
Ooooh, I missed the narrow gauge reference!……….Lets talk trains….never had a great empathy with continental narrow gauge, but give me The Manx Northern Railway, or the Lynton and Barnstaple, or even the strange atmospheric bog traversing railways of Donegal and the West coast of Ireland, and I could wax lyrical for hours. (Hope the wife’s not reading this :o/)…..